Please, boys, please/
Be careful with that cheese/
For the Beefy Cheese Louise/
If anything should happen/
You'll put me in a squeeze/
You'll bring me to my knees/

dimanche, mars 04, 2007

AMERICA

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.America two dollars and twentyseven cents January17, 1956.I can't stand my own mind.America when will we end the human war?Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.I don't feel good don't bother me.I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.America when will you be angelic?When will you take off your clothes?When will you look at yourself through the grave?When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?America why are your libraries full of tears?America when will you send your eggs to India?I'm sick of your insane demands.When can I go into the supermarket and buy what Ineed with my good looks?America after all it is you and I who are perfect notthe next world.Your machinery is too much for me.You made me want to be a saint.There must be some other way to settle this argument.Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come backit's sinister.Are you being sinister or is this some form of practicaljoke?I'm trying to come to the point.I refuse to give up my obsession.America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.America the plum blossoms are falling.I haven't read the newspapers for months, everydaysomebody goes on trial for murder.America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.America I used to be a communist when I was a kidI'm not sorry.I smoke marijuana every chance I get.I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the rosesin the closet.When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.You should have seen me reading Marx.My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.I won't say the Lord's Prayer.I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.America I still haven't told you what you did to UncleMax after he came over from Russia.I'm addressing you.Are you going to let your emotional life be run byTime Magazine?I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.I read it every week.Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the cornercandystore.I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-men are serious. Movie producers are serious.Everybody's serious but me.It occurs to me that I am America.I am talking to myself again.Asia is rising against me.I haven't got a chinaman's chance.I'd better consider my national resources.My national resources consist of two joints ofmarijuana millions of genitals an unpublishableprivate literature that goes 1400 miles an hourand twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions ofunderprivileged who live in my flowerpotsunder the light of five hundred suns.I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiersis the next to go.My ambition is to be President despite the fact thatI'm a Catholic.America how can I write a holy litany in your sillymood?I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are asindividual as his automobiles more so they'reall different sexes.America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500down on your old stropheAmerica free Tom MooneyAmerica save the Spanish LoyalistsAmerica Sacco & Vanzetti must not dieAmerica I am the Scottsboro boys.America when I was seven momma took me to Com-munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos ahandful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and thespeeches were free everybody was angelic andsentimental about the workers it was all so sin-cere you have no idea what a good thing theparty was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grandold man a real mensch Mother Bloor made mecry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybodymust have been a spy.America you don't really want to go to war.America it's them bad Russians.Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.And them Russians.The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's powermad. She wants to take our cars from out ourgarages.Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-tions.That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make usall work sixteen hours a day. Help.America this is quite serious.America this is the impression I get from looking inthe television set.America is this correct?I'd better get right down to the job.It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathesin precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted andpsychopathic anyway.America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.- Berkeley, January 17, 1956